Beyond compliance: rethinking climate reporting for an uncertain future

The discussions at the inaugural UNSW Climate Accounting, Reporting, and Assurance (CARA) Dialogue demonstrated how reporting is no longer just a compliance exercise, but rather a systems, governance and decision-making challenge – unlike anything institutions have faced before.

This week, something extraordinary happened.

Researchers, standard setters, government agencies, climate scientists, accountants, auditors, industry practitioners and technology experts gathered at UNSW for the inaugural Climate Accounting, Reporting and Assurance – or CARA – Dialogue.

And nobody wanted the conversation to end.

Hosted by UNSW’s Institute for Climate Risk & Response (ICRR) and the School of Accounting, Auditing & Taxation (AATX), the event brought together an extraordinary cross-section of climate, financial, reporting, assurance, regulatory, policy, scientific and industry expertise to explore a singular challenge:

“How do institutions built around financial reporting, assurance, governance and risk management engage meaningfully with forms of uncertainty, complexity and systems change they were never originally designed to handle?”

What emerged very clearly is that climate-related financial reporting is not simply a technical compliance exercise.

It is forcing organisations to confront deeper questions about evidence, governance, systems integration, organisational capability and decision-making – many of which sit at the frontier of existing institutional frameworks.

Climate risk cannot always be reduced to a single number, a single model output or a single “most likely” pathway. Organisations need to know under what conditions could a system, asset, strategy or business model fail.

Answering that question requires connecting physical climate risks with transition dynamics, market responses, policy change, technology uptake, organisational vulnerability and systemic consequences.

It also requires bringing different forms of expertise into the same room – to exchange perspectives, build shared understanding, test assumptions and develop more decision-useful approaches to climate risk, reporting and assurance.

The strongest message from participants was that this should not be a one-off conversation.

There was a clear appetite to build something ongoing, practical and meaningful – a forum capable of connecting expertise across domains, surfacing emerging challenges early and helping institutions navigate new forms of organisational complexity and uncertainty.

A sincere thank you to everyone who contributed so openly and constructively throughout the day, to making CARA such a thoughtful, generous, and intellectually rigorous discussion. We were especially grateful to those who travelled interstate and internationally to be part of the discussion.

We are looking forward to the next stage.